A wide variety of video playback devices are available in the marketplace. Most people own, or are familiar with, a video cassette recorder (VCR), also referred to as a video tape recorder (VTR). More recently, video recorders that use computer magnetic hard disks rather than magnetic cassette tapes to store video programs have appeared in the market. For example, the ReplayTV™ recorder and the TiVO™ recorder digitally record television programs on hard disk drives using, for example, MPEG-2 compression. Additionally, some video playback devices may record on a readable/writable digital versatile disk (DVD) rather than a magnetic disk.
Virtually all the systems that are capable of playing video programs have fast forward and rewind features. During the fast forwarding or rewinding of a video program, the audio portion of the video program is usually muted. As is well known in the art, increasing the speed of a video program, whether rewinding or fast forwarding, causes distortion in the audio. There are methods for speeding up the playback of speech by 50% with minimal effect on quality. However, this is not sufficient for high speed play modes and non-speech segments of the audio track.
There is therefore a need in the art for a system and method that will provide the playback video signal with corresponding undistorted audio during fast play modes such as fast forward.